Lady Gaga Admits Having an Addiction to Marijuana

The singer, 27, said that she smoked marijuana to deal with the mental and physical challenges of her career, including a recent hip injury that forced her to cancel a large portion of her Born This Way tour.

"I have been addicted to it and it's ultimately related to anxiety coping and it's a form of self-medication and I was smoking up to 15-20 marijuana cigarettes a day with no tobacco," she said on Elvis Duran and The Z100 Morning Show.

"I was living on a totally other psychedelic plane, numbing myself completely, and looking back I do see now that some of it had to do with my hip pain. I didn't know where the pain was coming from so I was just in a lot of pain and very depressed all the time and not really sure why," she said.

The pop star said that over the years, she has experimented with various drugs to avoid difficult emotions – particularly challenges that arise from being in the public eye.

"I've been addicted to various things since I was young. Most heavily over the past seven years. A friend gave me this term, 'I lily pad from substance to substance,' because I get to a point where I can't go any further with one substance so I move to another."

"But, the truth is that it is very hard to be famous," she added. "It's wonderful to be famous because I have amazing fans. But it is very, very hard to go out into the world when you are not feeling happy and act like you are because I am a human being too and I break, and I think there is an assumption . . . that I cannot break because I am an alien woman and I am unstoppable."

"The truth is that I can break, and I did. I was not very good at breaking. I lost everything that I love. I was in a wheelchair for six months. I did a lot of drugs and took a lot of pills," she admitted.

But Gaga said she plans to "fight" her addiction, and challenge herself to create music without the aid of mood-altering substances.

"I do put that pressure on myself; I have to be high to be creative. I need that, that's an error in my life that happened for over 10 years. Can I be brilliant without it? I know that I can be and I have to be because I want to live, and I want my fans to want to live."